FCPA, ISV Parter to Standardize Integration of Images with EMR

Enterprise content management (ECM) technology has always advertised the ability to manage unstructured information. It turns out that "Clinicians in the U.S. create more than a billion clinical notes each year. More than 60% of the full patient narrative resides in these unstructured documents and outside of discreet data elements within an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) database. These notes are often used as the primary source of information for reimbursement and proof of service."

This is according to a recent press release issued by Fujitsu Computer Products of America (FCPA) announcing its partnership with Osmosyz, which seems to be a capture and workflow integrator specializing in EMR. FCPA has integrated its network scanner with Osmosyz's ChartMD software to create image files that meet the "Unstructured Document" standard "based on the HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA)." The standard is being promoted by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and the Health Story Project, a collaborative of healthcare vendors, providers and associations.

"Today, based upon the unstructured document standard, Fujitsu is launching the first and only solution of its kind designed to support Meaningful Use Stage 1 requirements and meet anticipated requirements for Stage 2, as defined in the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act....The Inofile interface on the Fujitsu network scanners allow hospitals and clinics to scan a batch of documents, perform a quality assurance check of the documents on the touch screen, index the documents with a few simple keystrokes, and upload the documents to a content repository or EHR without having to be tied to a workstation."

Also from the press release, "“Fujitsu and Osmosyz worked hard through Health Story to create a standard for managing unstructured documents within health information systems, and we couldn’t be happier about the current traction the standard is getting and the forth-coming recognition by the federal government for Meaningful Use,” said Victor Kan, executive vice president and chief operating officer, Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Inc. “The Fujitsu network scanners with Inofile are the first and only solution available today that use standards-based capture to create smart documents that can be easily integrated into any EMR system and support national goals for healthcare information exchange.”

Does EMR Work?

Here's an interesting article, which the TAWPI Link-in Forum originally linked me to. It's on a study by UC-Davis about the effect of electronic medical records (EMR) on physician productivity. The bottom line seems to be that the increase in data entry required by new EMR implementations is often a hindrance to medical personnel getting their jobs done. Clearly, there is some ramp-up period, and in many cases, the systems to seem to help productivity slightly in the long-run, but not in call cases. Definitely sounds like an opportunity for better capture technology.

It's probably important to note that this study only looks at physicians productivity and not back-office administrative/billing stuff, where imaging has certainly been proven to increase productivity.

Iron Mountain Asks CMS to Consider Scanning

Paper storage giant Iron Mountain has come up with an interesting pitch to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Basically, they seem to be asking the CMS to more heavily consider the benefits of scanning when defining "meaningful use," which is the criteria for receiving reimbursements for electronic medical records (EMR) implementations.

This is interesting because at the Laserfiche user conference I attended earlier this year, an SI who services the medical market indicated that document imaging was not really an important criteria for meaningful use and thus had gone with another ISV, instead of Laserfiche, for its EMR requirements. Iron Mountain is, of course, motivated by the fact that it "manages hardcopy and digital healthcare information for more than 2,000 hospitals across 43 states" and has a growing document scanning business. Nonetheless, this type of lobbying could be a good thing for our entire industry, which is one reason its nice to now have $3 billion companies like Iron Mountain participating in our space.

Vignette hits bump

It looks like high-end document imaging/WCM specialist Vignette hit a small bump this quarter. At least they are still making money. I must admit that I was crediting a lot of their recent success to their acquisition of Autstrian imaging power Tower (was it Software or Technology?) and was a bit worried when they started talking about their hopes for next-generation WCM systems to boost revenue in the second half of 2007.

I love the reference to "cloud computing" (which I think is the SaaS model) in this article about Adobe's recent word processing acquisition.

Nuance and Iron Mountain both made recent acqusitions that move them further into the health care vertical. Nuance, which has a very successful speech-to-text business with its Dragon Naturally Speaking product line for medical transcriptions, acquired a medical imagnig (not document imaging) company. Iron Mountain bought on off-site medical records sepcialist. On a somewhat related note, our pediatrician's office is currently moving to an EMR system and actually told my wife they were trying to do more diagnoses on the phone to avoid havnig patients come in during the transition. Of course, our son had a double ear-infection that they couldn't properly diagnose over the phone, so we had to go in a couple days later anyhow. And then they supposedly electronically faxed the perscription to the pharmacy, which never got it, and the pharmacist made some comment along the lines of "that stuff never works when they try it." Oh well, score one (or two I guess) for the luddites.

Ralph

Ralph